Time Reporting - Actual vs. Estimate

[Jim Smith]

Is there a way in Rally to produce report that will show me actual time charged vs. estimates? Sometimes I've worked at other places where these were called Time Exception Reports or Variance report. 

I would like to quickly identify a comparison of total actuals vs. total estimates on a story or total actuals vs. estimates by person overall or even by story.  In addition, I'd also like to see if I can identify who has not  charged time for the week. 

Next, could we automate this type of report?

[Nik Antonelli]

Hi Jim,

From the questions you are asking, it sounds like there is quite a focus on hours worked at your organisation. Almost to the point that it seems a little unhealthy.

We try to steer folks away from the hours worked and more towards the value achieved. It would make more sense if you could look at the story point delivery rate or some other team related metric rather than personal hours logged. Obviously, if your company is having to cross charge, the onus is on to get the hours logged, but I would ask if the organisation should be looking at some other way of making sure things get done.

To answer your specific  question, you could enable the RTT module (Rally time tracker) in your workspace and then you can log actuals. There are a few apps and a couple of custom apps that might help you if you are mandated to work in hours.

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Nik
Rally Sales Engineer
Rally Software
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[Jim Smith]

Thank you @Nik Antonelli. I beleive we are using the time tracker module. Would you suggest any specific apps to look at?

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[Caroline Cobert]

I'd be interested to get more guidance on this as well. It's critical for us to be charging accurate times against Work Items and there are definitely cases where we'd like to use actuals to refine future Work Item estimates, but using Timesheet in Rally does not make it easy. Is RTT a different version of Timesheet or something? Does it enable more reporting within Rally so I can see, for example, if a task or Work Item is going hugely over-budget on hours?

Nik- it's a good point you make about an organization's focus on value vs hours, but in our case we have to bill clients accurately, comply with certain international working laws (eg- workers in certain countries are restricted from working over a certain amt of hours per week), and try to refine our internal expectations on work estimates, all of which are keyed specifically to hours over value. Would be super helpful if the native Rally Timesheet app made it easier to see where we were encountering big differences in actual v expected time.

Thanks for the info!

[Nik Antonelli]

For those that count hours, I have some options:

https://github.com/nikantonelli/TeamLoading (in-sprint assessment of overloading)
https://github.com/nikantonelli/TeamLoading2 (many sprint totals per person, per team assigned)
https://github.com/nikantonelli/TeamUtilisation (plots team totals over a number of sprint)
https://github.com/nikantonelli/portfolio-timesheet-export (takes all the TImeSheet entries and organises them in a table to be sorted and summed. Can export too)

I haven't searched through the community yet, but have a look here as well: https://github.com/RallyCommunity


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Nik
Rally Sales Engineer
Rally Software
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